And because of the constant disruption of normal life, this becomes the new normal. Using the LGBTQ laws as the mode through which the book shows a lot of this, Gessen shows us numerous examples of where state apparatus doesn’t have to almost anything to engineer the controlling affects they desire. To me it’s similar to the process of control that Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish, where a soldier’s body is reformed along small movements first by the positioning of a finger, then a hand, then an arm etc, as well as the ways in which control is shifted from the exterior to the interior, they ways in which people begin to control themselves. And by the way, there’s no end to violence and threat of violence throughout, so I don’t there’s no violence, but in especially authoritarian control, there’s the attempt to make the irrational and awful become everyday, and therefore regular.
Using Arendt as a sort of central figure, this book helps us to understand that totalitarianism is a totalizing control over a country, but that doesn’t automatically mean oppressive violent tactics. In addition to this, their research into studies of totalitarianism helps a lot. Like in their brother Keith Geesen’s novel, A Terrible Country, what I felt was Gessen’s innate understanding of Russia as a guilding force. Gessen spends a lot of time in this book discussing definitions and how they do and don’t apply to various political realities. The subtitle “How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia” is answered through these stories as well as through Masha Gessen’s narration as historian and journalist adding historical detail and context as necessary. This book is structured as a kind of oral history (though written in the third person) in which four main characters and their lives tell the story of Russia and the Soviet Union from the 1970s through 2015 or so.
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